Little Cayman, July 2007

Kim and Todd took a trip to Little Cayman island, June 28 to July 5, 2007.  Little Cayman is a small island - one mile wide by ten miles long.  Only 100 or so people live on the island, and it almost seemed as if we met all of them during our stay.

 Photos

Topside Photos - Courtesy of Kim (and some are by Todd)

Underwater Photos - Courtesy of Todd (underwater photos are Copyright Todd Krebs, 2007.  All rights reserved.)


The Resort
We stayed at Southern Cross Club Fish and Dive Resort.  It only has 12 rooms, and our room was at the "Blossom Cottage," which is a two-bedroom cottage at the edge of the resort.  When we weren't diving, we were resting in the resort's hammocks or dipping in the pool.  We had breakfast, lunch and dinner included in our stay.  Omlettes for breakfast, sandwiches or other snacky things for lunch.  Dinners were fish or pork or chicken.  Sometimes dinner was a buffet, sometimes it was a sit down dinner.  Sometimes meals were outside by the pool, sometimes they were inside.  Our last night at the resort was a dinner on the beach, followed by fireworks out over the water.  After dinner, we usually sat on the dock with some of our friends that we met at the resort.

So, a basic day was...

6:30am - Wake up, get ready
7:00am - Breakfast
8:00am - Dive boat departs for 2 tank dives
12:30pm - Back at the resort, have lunch.
2:00pm - Afternoon Dive, hammock and resting on the beach afterwards OR
4:00pm - Dusk Dive, with hammock and resting on the beach before.
6:00pm or so - Cocktail hour
7:00pm - Dinner
8:30pm - Hanging out on the dock under the [full] moon or stars
10:00pm - Back in the room for relaxation / bedtime

New Friends

We met Matt and Ellen, who are from Indiana.  They stayed the same length of time that we did (arriving the same day and leaving the same day).  Matt reminds us of Todd's Dad.  Both of them travel as much as I'd like to travel.

We also met Ed and Adele, from Chicago, who are excellent divers.  David came later in our trip, and he is from Atlanta.  Trish is from Colorado, and there was another family from Colorado who were not divers, but seem to want to start diving soon.  Caroline and Sunil live in New Jersey, but Caroline is originally from France.


Diving

We completed 17 dives.  We arrived at the resort on Thursday the 28th at 1:30pm, and we were immediately approached by Mark, a divemaster from London, who wanted us to go on the 2pm dive.  We resisted, since I was opting for lunch instead, but it was clear that Todd was giving the 2pm dive serious thought.  We rested in hammocks after lunch and then our very first dive of the trip was a night dive at 7pm that night on the Soto Trader.  We usually did 3 dives per day, with the exception of day 2 (only 2 dives in the morning) and our last day (July 4, we couldn't dive in the evening or afternoon so that we could fly the next day).  We did 2 dusk dives, where the reef was winding down for the evening, which meant that the fish were mating (woo hoo!) and feeding (yummy yummy!).

Our divemasters were Mark (from London), Steve (a world traveler), Ron (who didn't lead any dives, but doubled as the chef for the resort), and Chris (manager of the resort and a big fan of swim throughs).  We got to pet an octopus, we saw plenty of squid, a few of which came within inches of my mask, lots of lobsters, three nurse sharks (two were sleeping, one was motoring past us probably considering some sort of meal), Turtles (we saw at least one turtle a day, and usually saw one on every dive), Spotted Eagle Rays, stingrays, eels (Goldentail, Green Moray, Spotted) and lots of fish and beautiful corals.

Kim got very used to swim throughs, which she really hadn't done before.  At Randy's Gazebo, we passed through a very exciting chimney that we'd looked forward to all week.  

The Cactus

One night, after a few gin & tonics, Kim went to the bathroom and on the way tripped over a cactus.  The spines were stuck all down her legs and Todd spent the evening pulling them out (he is awesome).  We think there are still a few left in there...

Going Home

We headed out on July 5, leaving the little tiny island (the airport is very small, and the runway was only recently paved), and headed to Grand Cayman.  All was well until flying into Miami, where we circled the airport for 40 minutes.  We finally landed and faced a horrible crowd at the baggage claim.  After waiting almost an hour for our bags (one was lost for a while, but mysteriously appeared while we were filling out paperwork.  Our 9pm flight was delayed until 9:45 when we checked in.  We had dinner at the hotel and then got a phone call from American Airlines that the flight had been canceled due to weather (thunderstorms).  So, we spent the night in the Miami Crowne Plaza, finally making it home (after a 1 hour delay on a 4pm flight on Friday) the next night at 9pm.